


next time i'm in church

by cassanovic



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: AH! MORE SEX DREAMS OF THE RONAN LYNCH VARIETY, Crushes, Driving, Funerals, M/M, burial, church, i honestly can't think of anything else that might warrant a tag, pynch - Freeform, the murder squash song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 10:29:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4431809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassanovic/pseuds/cassanovic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronan and Adam run homoerotic errands, some of which include going to church and burying a dead (dream) body.</p>
            </blockquote>





	next time i'm in church

**Author's Note:**

> dedicated to [caroline](kctiebishop.tumblr.com).

Monday, Ronan has the dream: fingers dry down his back, tattoo peeling back from his skin. He closes his eyes and opens them and Adam’s cupping it in his hands, a mess of blue beaks and oily feathers and dully-glinting knives. Eyelids aflutter, black and red. Adam will cut himself on it. Adam won’t cut himself on it. Adam pushes it down his own throat, mouth gasping.

Ronan wakes up and he can’t move.

Tuesday, Ronan has the dream again. Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday he has it, on loop, fingers on his back, his hands, his face. Sunday he wakes up and Adam’s standing by the foot of his bed and for a single, wet moment, Ronan’s sure he dreamed him, too.

“Wake up,” Adam says, softly. Ronan squints and pushes the covers off his chest, feeling the heat lift off his skin. Adam’s eyes follow the movement.

“You… Sleep loud,” he says, mouth full of rough Virginia vowels. Ronan feels something sharp knock against his ribs; Adam clears his throat. “Really loud.”

“What kind of loud,” says Ronan, feeling around himself for something he didn’t go to bed with. Nothing. He thinks back to what he was dreaming before everything was swallowed by the light coming in his window: nothing.

“Like, moaning loud,” says Adam.

“ _Moaning_ loud,” says Ronan.

Adam very pointedly does not meet his eyes.

“Oh,” says Ronan, morning soft. Shame blooms low in his gut; his hands itch to pull the covers back up. Chainsaw screams from the corner of the room. It sounds like she’s coughing something up.

“Easy,” says Ronan. Then, to Adam: “I’ll be out. Don’t wait up.”

“I won’t,” says Adam.

-

Ronan feeds Chainsaw breakfast and puts on nice pants. Adam’s outside when he emerges from his shoddy wood boy cave, blinking at the bright white sky.

“Nice sweater,” says Adam, leaning casually against the side of his shitty Hondayota, in sharp relief against the sky: the slope of his nose, the jut of his shoulders through his blue T-shirt.

“Shut up,” says Ronan, looking strange swallowed in black yarn.

“Gansey and Blue?” asks Adam.

“Out,” says Ronan. Something flips across his mind, fast: three am, lying awake in bed, hushed voices in the next room over. The gentle hanging up of a phone, the Pig roaring carefully out the driveway.

“Good,” says Adam. “I have the body, in my trunk. I’m thinking I’ll wait in the car while you have your Catholic service, you’ll ignore Declan, and then we can have a proper clone burial.”

“You don’t have to wait in the car,” says Ronan. “That would be – God. You want to burn to death in a metal can under the shitty Virginia sun?”

“Yes,” says Adam.

Ronan stalks over and gets in the car. Adam climbs in on the driver’s side and turns the keys in the ignition. The radio sputters on and screeches: _SQUASH ONE, SQUASH T –_

Ronan grins suddenly, the edges of it cutting into his cheeks. He looks at Adam, taking in the sharp curve of his brow, the frown in his forehead, the fact that Ronan’s tape is the first thing to play, in his car.

“It’s only – God – I’m going to turn this off,” says Adam, pulling out of the driveway.

He doesn’t turn it off. Ronan grins wider. He turns it up so loud he can feel it when he leans his head on the side of the car and closes his eyes.

-

Adam follows Ronan into the church. There’s a little breath of dust and air when he steps in, Ronan holding the door open for nobody, light pushing in from stained glass above and to the side. Declan and Matthew are already sitting in a pew together, down the aisle. Ronan’s mouth twists.

“Hey, Matthew,” says Ronan, when they’re close enough to talk. Matthew smiles beatifically and reaches out to pat his arm.

“Hey, Ronan,” greets Declan, woodenly. Adam sits down between Matthew and Declan. Ronan sits next to him on the Matthew side, hands jittery in his lap. He nudges Adam with his knee, then pulls his leg back and knocks his feet on the seat in front of them.

Declan turns to them, rests his gaze on the sliver of space between Ronan and Adam for a second. His face tightens.

“The choir’s starting!” Matthew says loudly, swinging his legs back and forth on the bench. Ronan’s legs knock beside his and Adam watches them, watches the movement of Ronan’s hands fisted in his lap. A song starts, from the stage.

Adam looks around at all the starched collars around him and at Ronan’s own fucking argyle sweater and at himself and feels something strange at the base of his torso: Ronan’s forearm, warm space between it and Adam’s carefully-washed slacks. Something in the way Ronan’s head is turned stiffly forward, at the crucified Jesus hanging on the wall.

Adam thinks about the cold flesh in the trunk of his shabby car and shivers.

When the song bleeds into another one, Adam closes his eyes, opens them slowly, and stands up. Ronan looks at him, mouth thin in confusion, dark eyes framed by darker eyelashes.

Adam leaves and waits in the car until the service is over.

-

Ronan gets in, and Adam turns on the ignition. _SQUASH ONE, SQUASH TWO, SQUASH…_ Ronan turns it down, but a small enough amount that they can both still hear the guitar stylings of internet fads gone viral.

When Adam had left the church, there’d been something in Ronan’s skull. A fire being watered out. The choir filed offstage, the pastor talked about reconciliation, everyone stood up and started talking as they left, Declan said something patronizing to Ronan. Ronan ignored him and rubbed Matthew’s head in goodbye and fast-walked out into the parking lot.

“I needed quiet,” explains Adam, once they’re pulling out onto the road, Ronan’s seatbelt hanging uselessly and tapping the window. It was quiet enough in the church, but Ronan knows what he means. The church has too muffled, too gray of a silence to let you think about anything other than yourself.

“I didn’t ask,” says Ronan. “What the hell would I need to know that for? I just – have you just been cooking in here, for the entire service? Ignition off?” He tears off his sweater, hand on the back of his collar. Adam just looks at him, makes a weird shape with his mouth.

“You write a eulogy?” asks Adam. “For… yourself.”

“God, no,” says Ronan, scratching behind his ear. “Did you?”

“I thrive on spontaneity,” says Adam, drily.

“Guess that’s what I deserve,” says Ronan, giving Adam a savage smile.

“It’s really not,” says Adam, making a turn down a wooded road: twigs cutting the sky, leaves too new to be brushed to the curb, which is really more a ridge of dirt than anything real to go by.

“Hm,” grunts Ronan, watching Adam’s hands, the wheel sliding under them. They’re beautiful, full of a regal grace, smooth knuckles and long fingers and blue veins. They’re also shiny with moisturizer. The corners of Ronan’s mouth twitches, at that. He puts his hands behind his neck.

The murder squash song ends, and something very flute-filled and lilting comes on immediately afterward. Adam raises his eyebrows, Ronan takes his sunglasses out of his pocket and puts them on. A woman starts singing.

Adam raises his eyebrows higher.

“Oh look,” says Ronan, knocking his hand on the window. “We’re here.”

-

Adam parks. Ronan watches the trees. Even through his sunglasses, they’re washed out, dull, devoid of magic. As far away from Cabeswater as possible, was the idea. The engine sputters to a stop and they get out of the car. Ronan picks the body up from the trunk, fixes the black cloth wrapped around; Adam gathers the tarp and shovel stored behind it.

Once they’ve found a smooth patch of ground, closed in on each side by thick, yellow trees, Ronan puts the body down on top of the tarp and brushes some leaves from the edges. Adam starts scooping out loose, dry dirt from the ground. When he pauses to wipe his hand across his face, Ronan gestures for the shovel. Adam hands it to him.

“Okay,” says Adam, once they’ve switched off several more times, created a slowly growing pile of spongey mass next to the empty grave. He puts the shovel down.

“A few words,” says Ronan, grimacing at the body. He blows out a bit of air, warm in the autumn settling in around them, rubs his bare arms. He crouches down and unwraps the body, careful not to jostle any limbs or touch dead dream skin. The cloth slides off and his face lies naked in the thin, filtered light: white, edged, alien. Blood crusted on the chin. It’s the same and it’s completely different, a funhouse mirror so smooth you can’t tell it’s twisting anything in the first place.

“Rest in peace,” Ronan continues, standing up, so gently. “Sorry you’re dead? That must be shitty.”

“You did something good,” says Adam, unfurling a dry leaf in his hand and placing it carefully on the body’s stomach. “You saved someone’s dream life.”

Ronan looks at Adam and his mouth curves, something small and real, and Adam isn’t sure how he ever thought there could be more than one of him. He laughs. Ronan’s eyes widen, surprised, and they start burying him, a proper burial, and when they’re done they pat the dirt down on top of the black cloth. By that time the sun’s coming in from the side of the trees, instead of from above.

“He was real?” Adam says, voice tilting up at the end. It isn’t a question. He looks at Ronan and thinks about the possibility that nothing that happens in a forest is ever true, that everything is something gray, created by a God. He thinks about Matthew, and Ronan’s mom, and still cows in a barn waiting for an invisible shred of a thought.

“Yeah, I guess,” says Ronan. “Not really.”

The phone in Adam’s pocket rings, tinny through the fabric. He picks up. Next to him, for no apparent reason, Ronan snaps his fingers.

“Adam?” asks Gansey, sounding very far away.

“We’ll be there,” says Adam. He does a Gansey sort of motion with his head, and Ronan nods. “We’re coming.” He hangs up.

“Hey, Adam,” says Ronan, looking straight into his eyes.

“Yeah?” says Adam.

“Nothing.”

**Author's Note:**

> the song playing in the car is something by enya, the title is from run this town by jay z. i would've used the everybody's on your dick, no homo line but i thought that might've given the wrong impression.
> 
> this is a crack fic? anyway it's very hard to write adam and ronan.
> 
> on tumblr at [millenniafalcon](millenniafalcon.tumblr.com).


End file.
